Annabelle

By Ruby Jean Jensen

PRETEND FAMILY
Jessica loved playing with the family of dolls she had found in the old house. She slipped away to visit them every chance she had, and pretended that she belonged there with this, her family—with her mother, the blond haired woman in the picture on the wall. As she played, she began to realize that sometimes the dolls were not where she had left them. At times she even imagined that she heard them whispering to her. And the name they whispered was—Annabelle—not her real name Jessica.

PROTECTIVE FAMILY
The dolls were so relieved, happy that Annabelle had finally come back to them. Surely everything would return to normal now—just as it had been. And this time they would protect Annabelle, to make sure that she never left them again ...

Annabelle is the 2nd of five “evil doll” books from Ruby Jean.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ruby Jean Jensen
• Release date: Apr 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951580056

Ruby Jean Jensen

Ruby Jean Jensen (1927 – 2010) authored more than 30 novels and over 200 short stories. Her passion for writing developed at an early age, and she worked for many years to develop her writing skills. After having many short stories published, in 1974 the novel The House that Samael Built was accepted for publication. She then quickly established herself as a professional author, with representation by a Literary Agent from New York. She subsequently sold 29 more novels to several New York publishing houses. After four Gothic Romance, three Occult and then three Horror novels, MaMa was published by Zebra books in 1983. With Zebra, Ruby Jean completed nineteen more novels in the Horror genre.Ruby was involved with creative writing groups for many years, and she often took the time to encourage young authors and to reply to fan mail.

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Prologue

Annabelle lived in dread of the days when business took Papa away from home, as it had now. She sought the sanctuary of her large doll house, and lost herself in her doll family, but sometimes a cry from another part of the big house reminded her that she, like her doll, Vesta, also had a brother and a baby sister.

Annabelle’s papa had built the doll house especially for her, perhaps because he knew she would need it for refuge from her mother’s explosive anger. It was tucked into the corner of her bedroom, a doll house of four rooms, two above and two below, large rooms in which her family of dolls lived comfortably. Only the papa doll, who wore a topcoat and spats like her papa, and of course a stovepipe hat, was too tall to stand up in the house. But when he came in it was his right to sit in his chair by the fireplace and rest, while in this house his wife, the mama of the children, made good things in the kitchen for them all to eat.

Upstairs in the children’s bedroom the baby slept in its crib, and the other two children played at the mama’s feet in the kitchen. Oh, but it was a happy home, and the ceilings of the lower floor of the doll house were high enough that Annabelle could sit there herself. Of course, she had to move furniture a bit, but the papa didn’t mind. He loved her. But most of all the mama loved her. And her brother and sister loved her. Their names were Victor and Vesta, named by Annabelle, the prettiest names she could think of. They might have been twins, because they were of a similar size. Only the clothing they wore, and the length of their hair, separated them in identity, for each of them had fine china faces, with pink cheeks and rosebud lips. They loved Annabelle and accepted her as their sister, and the papa loved her too, and the mama, of course.

On his last trip, her real papa had brought her a beautiful new doll, as tall as Annabelle herself. Too tall for the doll house. Annabelle, unable to find a place for her in the doll family, stood her in the corner between the doll house and the bedroom wall. She, unnamed, was going to be the beautiful visitor. Later, when Annabelle thought of a name suitable for her. She was a very alert, very intelligent doll who was appalled at the crying that came from downstairs. She returned Annabelle’s gaze in silence and dignity and with a growing horror in her blue eyes.

In real life, only papa loved her. Mama was . . . well . . . as Papa had said once, not well.

The cry became a scream that Annabelle could no longer pretend did not exist. It rose from somewhere below, penetrating walls and floors to reach Annabelle at the rear of the second floor. It was her brother, Zachary. There was a hoarseness in his scream, as if he had been crying for a long, long time. The scream was worse than any she had heard before, and she shrank from it and tried harder to pretend it wasn’t happening. Their mama often beat Zachary. Annabelle had tried to tell him to keep away, to go outside and play when Papa was gone, but though Zachary was two years older than herself, almost ten years old even, he seemed unable to remember her warning. Sometimes their mama was nice and loving and Zachary enjoyed her hugs so much that he forgot. But now Papa was gone, and Mama had sent the servants away, and Annabelle knew by the look on her face, the set of her mouth and the madness in her eyes, that it was going to be a bad time. And so she went immediately to her bedroom and her doll house as soon as she could be excused from the breakfast table. But Zachary had stayed downstairs, as if he were too charmed by his mother’s last hug to see what was in her face today. Oh, Zachary, Zachary, don’t scream so loud.

And now the baby, in her crib in the nursery, was adding her cry, and the sounds gathered, and amidst it all came another cry, almost a scream, but this of terrible anger from their mother. The sounds intensified as they came up the stairs, and there too was a terrible bump, bump, as Zachary was being dragged upward from step to step, and then a sliding as they went down the hall to the nursery.

Stop crying, baby sister, stop. Quickly, stop. Before she reaches you.

The mother’s scream of anger continued and grew louder as the baby's crying changed from fear to helpless terror. Then there was a loud thump against the floor, a cracking sound that made the floor beneath Annabelle tremble, and abruptly the crying baby was stilled. Only the screams of Zachary continued, and even those ceased suddenly a moment later.

A deadly silence prevailed. Annabelle’s ears rang with it. Echoes of the screams of her real-life brother and sister died away.

Annabelle crept quietly into the doll house and huddled back in the corner. Papa, she whispered, pleading to become one of them. Mama? She reached through the doorway into the kitchen to pull the large mama doll toward her, seeking the protection it gave, but her hand grew still on the arm of the doll.

Footsteps were coming down the hall, and sounds of a long skirt sweeping the oak floor.

Annabelle. Annabelle answer me!

Papa, Annabelle whispered, you’ll be sitting by the fire, while Mama is in the kitchen baking sweet potatoes and making cornmeal pudding, and when the witch knocks on the front door you will take your walking stick and go to—

The footsteps, growing faster and faster, had entered the bedroom, and the maddened voice was calling, Annabelle, you have hidden from me for the last time! Come out, come out of there!

The hand reached in to get her, and Annabelle realized there was no door closed against her because there was no front on the house at all. She began to scream in fear, as the baby had, and then in pain as the hand, covered in blood, reached her, tangled in her long hair, and began to pull her from the doll house.

Papa! Papa!

Behind her the papa doll stared straight ahead, toward the woman and the little girl.

Chapter One

Jessica had lived across the meadow from the old abandoned stone mansion all her life, but she was five years old before she actually noticed it, hidden as it was in the midst of its own tangle of woods and vines and encroaching swamp. As if suddenly on this day of her unhappiness it showed itself to her, it was there, one of its towers rising above the trees.

Jessica had been huddling at the corner of the duck pond, a small pool of water located near the pine grove in the back yard. Her hands covered her ears, but still she could hear the voices of her parents. They were mad at each other again, and Jessica had run out of the big house and hidden and they hadn’t noticed.

She looked up, tears blurring all that she saw, the shrubs behind the pines, the wire links of the six-foot-high fence that protected the back yard. A couple of cows in the meadow beyond the fence blurred into dark blobs. But suddenly she was noticing something, and as she stared her vision cleared.

There was a castle in the woods on the far side of the meadow. She could see a round room with a cap-like roof sticking up almost as high as the tallest tree. She got to her feet, went to the fence, and with her fingers hooked in the links, looked at the house, straining to see through the trees, vines and bushes that surrounded it.

When had the castle come? Had the elves and the fairies built it in the night? Was it a castle built for her? Was there someone living in it who wanted to be with her? It called to her and helped her forget that her mother and daddy were mad at each other. They had even forgotten that it was Sunday morning. She had come downstairs in her new blue Sunday school dress, bringing her hair brush for her mother to brush the tangles out of her long blond hair. But her mother hadn’t seen her. With her familiar face all strange and ugly, she had stood there, seeing nothing but Jessica’s daddy. They had forgotten Sunday School.

Jessica went back into the lawn and stood looking toward the room where her parents were. Open windows allowed their voices to reach Jessica across the back lawn.

—you’re trying to make another June out of me, Paul, don’t you see that? her mother shouted. I’m not your first wife. I have a personality of my own. It so happens I want a career, and you’ve known that for years. Why do you think I went to school? And now—it’s an opportunity I can’t miss. Why can’t I make you see that? I have worked my butt off these past four years getting that degree and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to throw it all into the closet and slam the door on it! What the hell do you think I was doing it for? My health?

Why do you need to work? When you married me, you were content. It was never agreed that you would work, take a job, whatever.

You said nothing when I wanted to go back to school!

I thought it was just a whim.

You are so old-fashioned, Paul. I never thought the difference in our ages went so deep, Paul, but do you know what you’ve become? A nineteenth-century husband!

What about Jessica? I thought that when you got that degree you wanted you’d stop flitting around for a while and spend some time with your daughter!

Jessica is doing fine. What is this? Some more of that stay in your place, woman’? Barefoot and pregnant? Jessica’s five years old. She’s not a baby. I want this job, Paul, and I’m taking this job!

Diane, New Orleans is more than a hundred miles away. Do you plan to commute?

No, not daily.

Then when in the hell are we supposed to see you?

The weekends, of course.

The weekends, shit! If that’s all you plan to be home, you can just damn well pack your things—all of them—and stay permanently.

Fine! That’s fine with me! I’ve never liked this country living anyway. Small town bunk. I don’t know why I ever let you seduce me into coming here. You’ll love it, you said, it’s part of an old plantation, a sweet clover meadow right across the backyard fence. Cows. You can hear the birds sing, you said. You didn’t say they’d wake me up at the ungodly hour of five a.m. You didn’t say anything about how boring a meadow with cows is. And nothing to do. Absolutely nothing to do.

You could take care of your child.

So what kind of life is that? Have you ever tried carrying on a conversation with someone who can’t read yet?

You liked it at first, Paul said in a weaker voice. You loved it here.

It was unique, that was all. It didn’t take me six months to find out how boring a small town can be. I want out, Paul.

Oh, so now we hear the truth. You’re not only bored with the house, you’re bored with me and Jessica. What about Jessica? Doesn’t she mean anything at all to you? When she was in diapers you bitched about that, and said you’d have more in common with her when she was older and could talk. Well, she’s older. She talks. So what about her? She needs a mother’s love and attention.

I can see her on weekends.

You can go to hell, Diane. If you leave here today, you can stay. And don’t think you’ll get Jessica if you ever change your mind.

Fine! Great. I never said I wanted to take her away from here, did I?

Jessica ran back to the fence and looked across at the castle hidden among the trees. She had never climbed the back fence before, but now with her mother’s voice vibrating in her ears, her head, her heart, with her feelings bursting out of her in a torrent of fresh tears, Jessica hooked her fingers in the strong wires of the chain link fence and began to climb. When she fell into the soft, sweet clover on the other side of the fence she stood up and ran, straight toward the hidden castle that beckoned, like the castles in her favorite stories.

Cows raised their heads and placidly watched her, a small figure in her blue Sunday School dress, fighting her way through the tall grass of the meadow.

Jessica stopped a hundred yards from the fence that enclosed the trees around the castle. She could no longer see the peak of the roof above the trees, but she had glimpses of old gray stone. She went closer to the fence and saw red-lettered signs that were fading to pink tacked to the wood posts. Even though she couldn’t read much yet, she knew the letters, and she spelled aloud, DO NOT ENTER. And another, on a neighboring post, had NO TRESPASSING.

Jessica went slowly to the fence and peered in. The yard was full of briars and trees and vines. Long streamers of moss hung down from the heavy limbs of the live oaks and dark green vines climbed their trunks. The sun didn’t shine there. The front of the house was shadowed and grey, the stones touched with greenish moss.

Jessica walked along the fence looking for a gate.

She paused and listened. It was very quiet here. She listened for voices, and heard none. She wondered how the people who lived here went to town, for there was no road, no driveway. And behind the house the forest began, and the swamp. She could hear the frogs now, in the swamp, a hundred pitches, from fine to low. The tree frogs and the bull frogs, and all the other frogs in between that she didn’t know much about. Her big brother, Robert, had told her about the frogs. And Mrs. Archer, the housekeeper, told her about everything else, when she wasn’t busy, or wasn’t reading. Her mother didn’t tell her anything. Her mother was beautiful, with full, black hair all in glossy curls around her face. Sometimes she allowed Jessica into the dressing room while she brushed and styled her hair, while she applied her makeup. But one day when Jessica experimented, and used her mother’s mascara and lipstick and all the other powders and rouges and pretty colors that she put on her eyelids, her mother had spanked her. It was the only time in Jessica’s life that she had been spanked, and remembering it now brought a new batch of tears. She sobbed against the rusting wire fence that surrounded the old castle.

Her mother didn’t want her.

Her mother was leaving, and she’d only come home sometimes. If Daddy would let her.

Suddenly Jessica heard a voice. A sweet, high voice singing. Or was it wailing in sadness? It was hard to tell, for it rose and fell, fading in and out of her grasp. It was so far away, so deep within the castle that she only caught snatches of it. There were no words, just a fine singing, a wailing, like the sounds of a plucked string on a harp. A feeling in the air of song and beckoning, Jessica decided.

Jessica drew in a deep breath and wiped her fists across her eyes to clear away the last vestiges of tears. Someone in the house was singing to her. Perhaps that person was high in the tower, and had seen her cross the meadow.

Jessica began moving along the fence again, looking for a gate. This fence had barbed wire at the top. Three strands. The barbs were triple barbs and very sharp, even though they were rusted. She wouldn’t be able to climb this fence. She knew that. And she knew about barbed wire because Mrs. Archer had told her. She had wanted to know one day how the cows knew to stay in the meadow, and Mrs. Archer had said they stayed in because they had to. Their pasture was surrounded by barbed wire. But, she said when Jessica cried, feeling that the cows should have more freedom than that, the cows really wanted to stay there, because they were safe there. If they got out on the highway a car or big truck would kill them. So the barbed wire was a good thing. Jessica supposed that whoever owned the castle didn’t want the cows in their yard. At her own house there was no barbed wire, but the fence was tall. And on the sides it was brick. Only at the back was it wire.

She came to the corner of the fence, and found a gate, just around the corner. It was wired shut, but she began to work with the wire, untwisting and untwisting, as the singing from the tower faded and returned. Gnats collected and swarmed around her face and she knocked them away. They flew on, a small cloud, going into the cool shadows of the yard.

The wire came loose, and Jessica carefully hung it over the barbed wire of the fence. The gate moved rustily, its sound raucous as the crows’ voices from over the swamp. The singing in the house stopped. It began again as she passed through the gate and paused. A faint path curled into the wilderness of the yard. She pulled the gate shut behind her to keep the cows in the pasture from entering, although none of them was close. They had forgotten her and had gone back to eating clover.

She moved along the path cautiously. Vines grew across it sometimes, obliterating it, so that it was hard to find it again. Streamers of moss had to be pushed aside. A large spider web held a fat spider, right over the path, and she got down on her hands and knees in order to crawl under it. She looked back at the spider and felt that it was watching her with its many eyes. Mrs. Archer had told her about a spider’s eyes. They were lined around its head like clearance lights on a big truck. Because of spiders, she didn’t go into dark places very often.

Suddenly the steps were in front of her, and she looked up. It wasn’t really a castle, she saw, not a huge one. It had only one tower, and that was nearly choked by dark green vines. There was one small window in the tower that she could see, but it didn’t look sparkling and clean like the windows at her own house.

The rest of the castle might have been disappointing, too, if she had compared it to the castles she had seen pictures of, but she was no longer comparing. There were long galleries across the front and down both sides of the house, but the upper gallery had fallen on the far end of the front. Set deep into the gray stone were narrow windows, all of them shuttered as if the castle were asleep. Some of the shutter slats had rotted away, and darkness peeked out. The big door was back in the shadows of the gray stone, just as the windows were. The ledges of the windows were wide enough to sit on, but the wood that held the windows was rotting, too, like the upper gallery floor, and the shutters.

Jessica began climbing the stone steps. She’d tell her daddy, she thought, that the lady who lived here needed help with her porches and her windows. He could send over the man who came to work at their house. The handyman, Mrs. Archer called him. Loosely, she had said, mind you use the word loosely when you call Jake a handyman. So, Jessica remembered to call Jake loosely a handyman.

Jessica crossed the stone porch to the door and stopped suddenly. The shadow of the doorway fell upon her and a chill wind came from somewhere around the house and made her feel cold. She looked up at an iron door knocker, a hideous face staring down at her, its eyes crusted with green moss. It was too high for her to reach even if she dared touch it.

Annabelle.

Jessica drew back, startled. Her sensitive ears had barely separated the word from the other sounds that reached her, the frogs in the swamp, the soft wind, the movement of things growing. She stared at the front door and listened, and heard no more.

The singing had stopped. She heard only the whine of the wind as it came through the cracks of the stone at the corners of the house. A wind that wasn’t blowing out in the meadow.

---

Diane flung clothes from her closet toward the luggage open on the bed, and on the floor beside the bed. The floor was strewn with clothing. Dresses, long and short, skirts, blouses, sweaters, jackets, suits, robes. She caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror in the back of the large, walk-in closet and paused. She looked wild, as if she’d been running through the woods, her hair snagged and tangled by reaching limbs. Her dark eyes snapped their fury. She paused, caught up in her image. Sometimes she could look at herself with the critical detachment of a model, as if she were examining someone else’s face. And always, she was surprised by the beauty. Stopped short. Brought to a stare. She could do this, she felt, without vanity. It was a cool and detached admiration that she might have for any beautiful creature, be it human or animal. And then when she attached it to herself, she became emotional. And filled with anxiety. Here she was, twenty-four years old now, and buried, you might say, on the remnants of an old plantation out on the edge of a swamp that reached miles into the background. Her beauty would dry up and she would become old and ugly, and for whom?

She wanted to see and be seen. There was a whole big world out there, and she wanted to live in it. The trips Paul had taken her on had been fun at first, and coming here to live in a home that was very close to being a mansion in its own magnificent setting was something different from her own modest background. But it hadn’t taken her long to find out that it was somewhat like looking at a beautiful painting. You could only enjoy it for a certain length of time before you wanted to move on.

She wanted to live. Why couldn’t anyone understand that? It was so frustrating she wanted to cry. Her mother didn’t understand. Their last conversation about it still irritated her ears like a mosquito buzzing there. I always said I’d never say I told you so, her mother said, in that maddeningly calm and oh-so-right voice of hers. But when you wanted to marry Paul, I told you that the age difference would matter someday. What he wanted was something different from what you wanted. Oh, I know, you were eighteen, and you thought you were grown. But. . . Uh-huh. Yeah, sure.

Well, now she knew. Her mother had been right, but that didn’t give her a right to be so certain now that she was doing the wrong thing again.

It always came back to Jessica. As if being the mother of Jessica had subtracted from her all other identities.

I can’t do it, she said aloud. I can’t do what they want.

She’d gone to work in one of Paul’s offices part-time while she was a senior in high school. She was eager to get out into the world and her grades had been good enough that she was allowed to work half a day and go to school half a day. It was also a kind of training program that some businesses offered to the students. She knew when she saw the big boss that he was twice her age or more, but it didn’t matter. He was handsome and rich and exciting. She had come on to him with all her power, and though he had at first acted scared of her, he had finally begun to relent.

The wedding was magnificent, and so was the wedding trip. To Honolulu. But then she had gotten pregnant almost immediately. And sick! Just thinking of how nauseated she was during the whole time made her want to run to the bathroom. The doctor and her mother and her husband had said it would only last a few weeks, but it had lasted the full nine months. By the time the frail little girl was born, both of them were about worn out. Even the baby had been sick for a while afterwards, spitting up milk, crying. A nurse had been brought in to take care of her and had stayed for six months. But even after that something had been lacking, even though the baby had begun to be well and beautiful. Diane thought now that perhaps some kind of attachment had not been made, especially on her part. Maybe she had been too young, yet she saw mothers just as young who adored their babies. Maybe she wasn’t meant to be a mother.

She stood in the middle of her bedroom and looked at the mess around her. Did she really want these clothes? With her promised salary, she’d be able to buy almost everything she wanted. A new life asked for new clothes. And how much fun it would be to be back in the city with all the shops and the restaurants.

She had to go. She had to hurry before Paul found some way of stopping her. If she tried to take all her things it would only delay her.

From the floor she picked up a couple of skirts and blouses, one long dress and one short, and threw them into a suitcase. She closed the case and latched it, then tossed makeup into the overnight case. When she went downstairs she chose the front door as her exit because she knew that Paul was probably back in the library where she had left him, or in his study. Pouting. He was such an old-fashioned guy. He had thought that all she wanted or needed was lodging and such for herself and the children she would bear. Like his first wife. She had to get out before he made her into that kind of woman.

She threw her suitcases into her car—Paul had, at least, given her that when she had gone back to school, and she was grateful. But did she have to pay for it with her life?

She went into the back yard to look for Jessica.

The child had everything a child could want. One wall of her bedroom had floor-to-ceiling shelves with a large collection of dolls and stuffed animals. In the back yard, a large area was allotted to play, with swings, slides and a merry-go-round. And over in one corner of the enclosed rear grounds was a miniature railroad track with its own little engine and passenger cars. The track curled around among the trees, shrubs, and flowers and had been Paul’s special gift to Jessica on her third birthday, and of course to Robert, his son by his